Terrorists all? How deliciously seditious

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The bombs that went off in Bali a month ago were barbaric
instruments of war, packed with ball bearings and other shrapnel
designed to maim as much as to kill.

Now imagine such weaponry going off, and such death and
destruction being visited on people, every eight minutes, around
the clock, for nine years.

That's what the people of Laos were subjected to from 1964 to
1973. Two million tonnes of cluster bombs were dropped on them by
the Americans. Each bomb contained 670 "bomblets", each the size of
a tennis ball, packed with hundreds of steel pellets. The monstrous
theory behind the technology was that an injured soldier was more
costly to an enemy than a dead one.

But it gets worse. By various estimates cited in Federal
Parliament yesterday, between 500,000 and 3 million pieces of
"unexploded ordnance" still litter the tiny country of 6 million
people (which, incidentally, remains a communist state).

Since 1973, 11,000 people have been recorded to have died, with
countless more crippled. But the real figures, as the Government's
Peter Slipper said, could be two to 10 times higher.

The speeches to yesterday's parliamentary motion - which arose
from a visit by a bipartisan delegation to Laos - were powerful and
shocking.

But the language all speakers used was far, far different from
that they use when talking about the Bali bombings. The word
"terrorism" was never used.

But if a small group of suicide bombers, fighting an undeclared
war for ideological reasons in Bali, are terrorists, why aren't
those who, during an undeclared war for ideological reasons,
dropped

2 million tonnes of similar bombs?

Because, as Salman Rushdie put it recently, in different
contexts "we make very different moral judgements about
people committing identical actions".

He drew a parallel between the French Resistance in 1940, who
"we think heroic", and the insurgents in contemporary Iraq, who
might equally be considered heroic opponents of an illegally
occupying power.

Now, there's a fair chance someone like Rushdie - who had a
fatwa declared against him by the Iranians - would be deemed to
have spoken in "good faith" under the sedition laws in the
Government's new terrorism package.

But you can bet some Muslim "blogger" wouldn't.

Which worries a lot of people. Is this Government about to make
the concept of freedom of speech as subjective as the concept of
terrorism?